After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit • Hacker News Board

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#171

Post by klipt » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #109

svara wrote: post #24

I've been diving into this literature a bit recently, and it's been mostly encouraging. Affordable clean energy is realistic. Clean energy sources are typically the cheapest sources of energy [0]. The intermittent production issue is solvable: At ~150 $/kWh storage, a combination of storage and renewables is the cheapest energy source 95% of the time [1]. The cost of different energy storage methods is coming down ex…

I've read about a couple of solar projects that projected x/kWh and turned out to be much worse in production. Pakistan's big deployment is one example, it was planned to be 100MW but only produced 18MW. Mostly because they didn't factor in the dust that would cover the panels, keeping them clean was very expensive (I'm curious how this applies to other proposed desert deployments). Nor factoring in the typical malai…

How high does the dust go? Maybe they could cut down on cleaning by just building a wall around the power plant, or add some fans to keep the dust out?

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#172

Post by anoncake » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #151

nicoburns wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we really need long-term storage? Wouldn't it be cheaper just to overprovision production?

Seasonal fluctuations in energy production are more extreme in far northern and southern latitudes. Which just so happens to be where the majority of energy consumption is located. The amount of energy storage required even to just handle the daily duck curve is staggering. To put this in perspective, the US consumed 11.5TWh of electricity daily. Global lithium ion battery production is 300GWh per year. Until some tr…

Nonsense. No one's going to use lithium ion batteries for this use case.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#173

Post by sacred_numbers » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #127

svara wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the things you're saying aren't correct, see my other comment (sibling to yours) for references. Nuclear is not cheap compared to photovoltaics, wind and hydro. Since the former two are bursty, overcapacity in them leads to cheap excess energy at times, which needs to be stored. Which storage method is the best depends on multiple factors, particularly on the duration of storage, capacity required and frequen…

Do we really need long-term storage? Wouldn't it be cheaper just to overprovision production?

It's almost always cheaper to overbuild renewables than to use seasonal storage. Seasonal storage is used once a year, so if you can store a Kwh of energy for $1 it still increases the cost of the stored electricity by 4-5 cents per Kwh. Let's look at a 1 Kw average output. Assume that you have 6 Kw of solar, along with 18 Kwh of batteries. This will work fine 7-8 months out of the year, but will not be sufficient for winter, so you will need seasonal storage. About 2000 Kwh should be sufficient to make up for the deficit. Alternatively, how much solar would you need to avoid seasonal storage? About 10-12 Kw would probably work. That would mean an additional $3,200 to $4,800 in capital costs, assuming 80 cents per watt of solar. In order for seasonal storage to compete it would need to cost less than about $2 per KWh. For hydrogen this would equate to about $40 per kg. That's on the low end of estimates I've seen for underground hydrogen storage, and doesn't even take into account the cost of generating the hydrogen. It also doesn't take into account revenue generated from selling excess electricity in summer. Even if you sold excess electricity for only 1 cent per Kwh you could still offset about half the cost of the extra solar capacity.

I think many people see excess capacity as a form of waste to be reduced, but it's like thinking that gigabit fiber is a waste because it's not used to it's full capacity. The value of oversupply is that it's always available when you need it. The fact that new industries can spawn from the super cheap rates for excess electricity or data is just a bonus.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#174

Post by kevinstubbs » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:53 PM UTC

zamfi wrote: post #160

walrus01 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly curious what is the big challenge with keeping large arrays of ground mounted panels clean in Pakistan. The prevailing wage for unskilled labor for a 6 day a week, 45-hour work week for one laborer to clean panels is probably about $250-300 a month (USD equivalent, in rupees) in that area. That would be a good wage compared to construction work or farm work in that region. With some basic equipment like…

Quoting the Wikipedia page cited above: > It required one litre of water to clean, each of 400,000 installed panels. A total 15 days cleaning cycle required, 124 million litres of water enough to sustain 9000 people, while rain in Cholistan desert is rare and far between. Providing such huge amount of water in desert terrain, became a challenging and daunting task for management team. Besides, the manual cleaning met…

What about a fleet of automated drones/machines which clean the panels by blowing air? I don't know, but it seems like physically scrubbing the panels would take more machinery (heavier), more moving parts (break down more easily), and the scrubs themselves would have to get replaced & careful not to be abrasive (not sure how much the panels "care" about it though). These "dusters" could run off the excess power too. I read somewhere else in this thread that one problem was the solar park would occasionally over-produce - maybe the fleet works whenever there is an overproduction, or after a certain amount of time has passed (we _must_ clean them now and can't wait until the next time of overproduction).

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#175

Post by sorenbs » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 8:59 PM UTC

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #106

sorenbs wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you need to follow Auke on Twitter :-P He has literally spent the last five years debunking this nonsense. Here's a thread from just 5 hours ago: https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1279359481177083904 TL;DR: These comparisons always use too much energy for battery production, too high efficiency for gasoline cars, and fail to take into account that the grid is rapidly decarbonising, even in backwater…

Those figures cited by Auke are self-reported by Tesla. Not saying that invalidates them but important to consider context. It would seem that emissions associated with battery production vary greatly depending on geography and mix of energy sources. Eg in Germany, emissions from Model 3 battery production are estimated at 11 to 15 tonnes per vehicle: https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-electric-cars-...

The 11-15 Tonnes come from the study that you referenced page is disputing?

There is a persistent narrative in Germany that diesel cars are better for the environment, and your comment is playing into that. This narrative is wrong and damaging.

Why are you doing this?

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#176

Post by acidburnNSA » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

boublepop wrote: post #165

mdavis6890 wrote: post #141

I wish I'd stop hearing about Hydrogen as a fuel source. It's not. It's just a battery, and should simply be compared to other types of batteries, like Li-Ion. Maybe Hydrogen fuel cells are better batteries, maybe not. But it's still just a battery, and needs to be charged from the electric power grid (by using the electricity to separate hydrogen from water), just like any other battery would.

The defining difference between fuel-cells and batteries is that fuel-cells don’t need to be “recharged” as in running an electrochemical reaction in reverse, they just need you to change the fuel.

But the fuel was charged from another source in fuel cells too. You don't mine hydrogen. The energy carrier point remains. The primary energy will be from gas, oil, coal, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, or tidal.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#177

Post by sorenbs » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #104

kolinko wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are those emissions calculated? Is there anything in the process that needs to generate co2? (like in concrete, where production of concrete generates co2 by itself). If this co2 is due to electricity/transportation cost then the problem will solve itself with more electricity from green sources.

Couldn’t you make the exact same argument about hydrogen? As renewables grow the emissions associated with hydrogen production will come down too.

Sure, but the total system loss for hydrogen is much higher, so unless renewable electricity becomes free, batteries win on tco.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#178

Post by justinclift » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

kevinstubbs wrote: post #174

zamfi wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting the Wikipedia page cited above: > It required one litre of water to clean, each of 400,000 installed panels. A total 15 days cleaning cycle required, 124 million litres of water enough to sustain 9000 people, while rain in Cholistan desert is rare and far between. Providing such huge amount of water in desert terrain, became a challenging and daunting task for management team. Besides, the manual cleaning met…

What about a fleet of automated drones/machines which clean the panels by blowing air? I don't know, but it seems like physically scrubbing the panels would take more machinery (heavier), more moving parts (break down more easily), and the scrubs themselves would have to get replaced & careful not to be abrasive (not sure how much the panels "care" about it though). These "dusters" could run off the excess power too.…

If you're going to clean things via physical automation, you could probably work out the energy cost involved ~reasonably well over time.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#179

Post by riku_iki » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #170

riku_iki wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but maybe they can use seawater for cleaning?

Would the salt be abrasive & damage the panels/coating decreasing efficiency? I would imagine another challenge is the transporation costs. The nearest fresh water source appears to be Sutlej River ~18 KM straightline. The nearest seawater source appears to be the Arabian Sea, ~800 KM straightline. The cost to a problem like this would never be labor as that can be trivially automated if it ever gets costly enough. W…

> Would the salt be abrasive & damage the panels/coating decreasing efficiency?

I imagine some glass coating should be cheap enough and efficient solution to implement.

> The nearest seawater source appears to be the Arabian Sea, ~800 KM straightline.

Sure, such plant has to be constructed near seawater source.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#180

Post by dang » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

bambam24 wrote: post #89

Does people get referral bonus for sharing this paid website links?

Paywalls are ok if there's a workaround. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. Yes, it sucks, but the alternatives suck worse. The Economist has been the source for a lot of good HN discussions, as have other soft-paywalled sites. We don't allow hard-paywalled ones.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989